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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

This book is in fact a box of loose pages that can be shuffled and read almost as you please. The box cover is in the style of an early Pink Floyd light-show with globs of purple and blue, and contains no words apart from "a novel" and the author, title and publisher. The cover is the only clue that this is no ordinary novel. It is in fact what cyberdudes now rave about: a hyper-novel. Published in 1969, it was probably the first of its kind. You open the box and find a half-inch thick stack of loose-leaf printed pages. Some pages are bound in four or six page signatures, other are loose single, or double- sided pages. The instructions inside the box lid tell you that these pages make up the 27 chapters of the novel. To start you must read the pages marked First, then the other 25 chapters in any order you like, and finally the chapter marked Last. It's a story told as chapters that appear as flashbacks, or real events depending on where they fall in your random sequence. Weird but it works, and without the Web!

B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates is a remarkable book. The novel is broken into 27 pamphlet-sized sections. Except for the first and last sections, the remaining 25 sections are intended to be read in random order.

The Unfortunates tells the story of a sportswriter who travels to a town to report on a soccer match only to discover he's been to the town several times before to visit an old school friend who has since died of cancer. Some of the separate sections of the book are recollections of the dead friend and other poignant memories of the past. Other sections describe the day of the soccer match. The switching back and forth from the present to the past happens at random, depending on the order in which the reader reads the sections. This randomness creates a disjointed reading experience that almost perfectly mimics how memories intrude into present consciousness. I doubt I've ever encountered a book structure or organizational scheme that has conveyed so much meaning.

In addition to the structure, the prose is a commentary on the mysterious workings of memory: ""I try to invest anything connected with him now with as much rightness, sanctity, almost, as I can, how the fact of his death influences every memory of everything connected with him." The overall mood is one of sadness, but Johnson inserts some levity by playing with language ("These men on their way to football, they are the same in any city, ... on their way to any match, their raincoats, their favours, in some cases, the real fan does not need to show his favour by favours, but by his fervour, and so on."). The mood is also lightened by the narrator's obvious enjoyment of day to day pleasures ("The cheese [rolls] had raw onion in them, anyway, a new taste, I enjoyed it, the crispness and the soft dough and clinging cheese. Ah.").

Without question, this is one of the most interesting books I've read in many years. I highly recommend it.

This book has its chapters arranged in random order. The reader is encouraged to arrange the chapters in any order desired. My cat and I had fun spreading the chapters all over the living room and then reassembling them. In the end months after reading the collection, my wife says she remembers the book in chronological order. The author was an original thinker and it is a shame he died early.